Corporations typically create and store large volumes of information that might be valuable to the enterprise, containing confidential information or intellectual property. Examples of such information might include emails between senior executives regarding an upcoming acquisition, invention disclosures submitted to legal counsel for review, draft versions of quarterly financial results being developed for release to shareholders, and corporate strategy documents.
Data leak prevention (DLP) technologies have been developed to help protect information from public release. For example, such technologies will monitor the traffic flowing through the border of a network looking for key expressions. Further, DLP has also focused primarily on personally identifiable information due to the compliance requirements surrounding such information. Apart from this, many system require administrators to provide tags, or specific keywords, for which the DLP engine will search.